This is my first SteemIt post! I am a crunchy, organic-homesteading mama of two with a third on the way in January. Our little homestead haven is nestled about an hour outside of Ottawa, Canada and I hope to share some ideas, tips, and memories with you as I continue on this amazing journey. My husband and I hope that you can learn from our mistakes and successes.
While I was deliberating on the topic of my first post, I did a lot of research on SteemIt. One thing I found amazing was the Trending Topics list. I have some experience in Google Analytics and I know it's about finding the balance between competition and payout. It seems that SteemIt is no different! If you can find a topic with a large payout and a small number of posts (less than 2,000) it seems that you would do better?! Of course this is speculation for me at this point but I am eager to see if my ‘theory’ is true.
Anyways, about homesteading. We recently moved to the Ottawa area from our previous homestead 7 hours West of here. We have chickens, Angus cattle, and a mulch garden. Mulch Gardening is awesome! If you have not heard of the back to Eden method then watch this video http://www.backtoedenfilm.com/?gclid=Cj0KEQjwhMjKBRDjxb31j-aesI4BEiQA7ivN-MZQu5McAWsyLuJyrSF-Lt_9RLaOrnfxSiRHChLwEAkaAlat8P8HAQ
This type of gardening naturally repels pests, inhibits weeds, holds water in flooding and conserves water in a drought. I don’t want to claim that it is a no-fail method but if the shoe fits... The soil here is clay and is like bedrock...to improve the soil it would take so much compost, and lighteners like vermiculite costing us hundreds of dollars we just don’t have. The mulch was free and so was the manure - that’s our preferred price! We also use the square foot gardening method and raised beds. We took what we liked from a variety of different ideas mixed them and we are pleased with the results. We call our garden “The Purple Patch” mainly because we grow a lot of purple veggies. Carrots, peppers, asparagus, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, lettuce, peas....all purple. Purple veggies contain anthocyanins which are POWERFUL for memory loss prevention, fighting cancer and boosting your mood. Of course, we also have plums, blueberries and haskaps (an up and coming berry that I will write about in another article).
Anyways here are my top 5 tips for successful homesteading...
Learn from others: Homesteading takes a LOT of patience, persistence, and ingenuity. The amazing thing these days is that the ingenuity can come from someone else and you can piggyback on their success. YouTube is full of videos showing you how to do pretty much anything you want from slaughtering a chicken, catching rainwater, building a coop, milking a cow and on an on. Of course, hands-on is preferable but if that’s not an option, the internet is your best bet!
Do it on a budget: Even if you have the extra cash, it is good to save it for a rainy day. One of the biggest mistakes I see new homesteaders doing is buying fancy equipment they don’t need and going into debt for it. Many times they realize later that they really don’t need that fancy tractor or they decide to change their homesteading style (ie. raise goats instead of cattle) and the equipment they bought for cattle can’t be used for goats or vice versa. If you learn to improvise and carefully select tools that can be used in many different scenarios, you will be much better off!
Buy only what you need: This may sound like a contradiction from the previous point but hear me out! Sometimes, we can take improvisation too far and spend 4 hours cutting the grass with a push mower when a riding mower can do it in a half hour. When you purchase tools, be sure to think it through and don’t try to garden with kitchen spoons and forks...use the proper tools for the job. The key is balance...you don’t necessarily need a $2,000 tiller the first year, you can maybe borrow or rent one but you do need hoes, garden rakes, and a hose. They key is to minimize your efforts without spending too much money to do so. I will write more about how to save $$$ on a homestead in a future article.
Start small: If you have little to no experience in homesteading, it is best to start small. The ‘honeymoon phase’ of homesteading is over fast when you have to get up in the middle of the night to protect your chickens from a predator or you are racing against the weather to finish a farm project. At times, it can be discouraging, frustrating and even heartbreaking. If you start small, you will learn as you go along and can avoid making BIG mistakes on a large scale. If you dream of making money from your homestead, then minimize your risks by starting small and working your way to a larger operation. Depending on where you live there are rules about selling produce, laws about animal containment, and regulations that govern if/how you can sell meat from your herd or flock. Learning these boundaries can take time and research so start with just one kind of animal like chickens and then get goats or cattle once you feel you have success raising the chickens.
Don’t give up on your goals: The main difference between a dream and a goal is that a goal is just a dream with an action plan. If you go from the dreaming stage directly to the homesteading phase, you open yourself up for disappointment and even failure. If, however, you take the time to plan, research and look into your ‘homestead dreams’, you will save yourself a lot of headaches. No one is perfect and you will make mistakes, the key is not to make the kind of mistakes that will break you and rob you of your chance to see your dreams come to fruition. Good planning, hard work and patience are the keys to your homesteading success!
Are you currently homesteading? Do you have any advice to share with fellow readers? Questions for me? Please comment below!